Windhoek — Namibia is holding elections for a new president and parliament today, November 27. The favorite for the highest office in the State is outgoing Vice President Ntumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, appointed by President Hage Geingob, who died suddenly in February this year. Nandi-Ndaitwah joined the ruling party in the early 1970s, the historic liberation movement WAPO (South West Africa People's Organization), which fought for the country's independence from South Africa. A party that has governed the country since independence in 1990, but which now seems to have lost an important part of its electorate.
In the last elections in 2019, SWAPO candidate Hage Geingob had received 56.3% of the vote, a sharp drop compared to the 2014 election, in which he had received 86.7% of the vote. The decline in support is linked to the strong economic and social inequality, the highest in the region and surpassed only by that of South Africa. Despite its wealth of natural resources, Namibia has high rates of poverty (17% of the population lives on less than $2 a day) and unemployment (19% of the working-age population), which mainly affects young people. And it is precisely these people who have turned their backs on SWAPO by voting for one of the twenty opposition parties that submitted lists for the parliamentary elections (with only 15 parties putting forward their own candidate for Head of State).
In addition to the Popular Democratic Movement (PDM), which emerged in 2017 from the pre-existing Democratc Turnhall Alliance, SWAPO's historical opponent (which won 16 seats in parliament in the last elections), most of the other major opposition parties were also founded by politicians who emerged from SWAPO. These are the Landless People's Movement (LPM), founded in 2017 by Bernadus Swartbooi, which puts land reform at the heart of its programme, and the Independent Patriots for Change (IPC), founded in 2020 by Panduleni Itula, who ran as an independent candidate in the 2019 presidential election and came second with 29.4% of the vote.
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And finally, the left-wing formation Affirmative Repositioning Movement (AR), which, like the Landless People's Movement, puts land reform and access to arable land at the heart of its programme, in a country where 70% of the agricultural land is in the hands of the white minority (6% of the population). In the run-up to the November elections, the Namibian bishops published a pastoral letter in May urging the faithful to vote.
"Elections in constitutional and multiparty democracies such as Namibia offer citizens the opportunity to freely and democratically elect their representatives who according to the Constitution of the Republic of Namibia 'shall regard themselves as servants of the people of Namibia and desist from any conduct by which they seek improperly to enrich themselves or alienate themselves from the people'," the bishops had warned.
They called on politicians to address the country's pressing challenges such as unemployment, poverty, gender-based violence and corruption, stressing that their electoral programs should include concrete strategies to improve living conditions and promote the common good.
